When I was a smoker, the anti-tobacco commercials were hilarious to me. Instead of scaring me by showing the effects of smoking, they made me want to light up a cigarette. I never really paid attention to what they were warning; I simply saw someone else smoking a cigarette and that made me want one too.
Now that I have officially quit, I see these commercials on television and their messages truly disturb me.
The information broadcast by thetruth.com’s Crazyworld commercials is mind-blowing. These commercials expose how tobacco companies bend the moral rules that all other American companies are forced to keep. Unfortunately, the people who need to listen are the ones who don’t ever quite get the message.
One commercial opens with over a thousand of people walking around outside of a tobacco company building. Suddenly, they all drop to the ground, symbolizing the 1,200 Americans that tobacco use kills every day. This comes to 438,000 people a year in the United States alone. Worldwide, tobacco kills around 4.9 million people a year.
What’s hard for me to understand is the logic of the American mind. We know that high cholesterol increases our chance of dying so we try to eat low-cholesterol foods. The fact that smoking greatly increases your chances of dying should set off the red lights and alarms in each of our minds. That would be logical.
Another commercial shows people digging through buggies of grocery items attempting to find the only item with no ingredients on the label. After inspecting each item thoroughly, the one that surfaces with no ingredients labeled is a pack of cigarettes.
Cigarettes contain several ingredients that are normally considered poisonous. The radioactive isotope Polonium-210 is found in cigarette smoke. The Hindu, India’s national newspaper, reports that “particles of smoke-bearing radioactive residues accumulate continuously in the narrow airways of smokers and form hotspots.” These hotspots then dispense high doses of radiation to the body. Coincidentally, most lung cancer is formed in these regions.
No wonder the companies don’t want to put the ingredients on their labels. I just wonder why the government doesn’t require them to tell the consumer that.
Two other commercials emphasize the “craziness” of the tobacco world by creating some very interesting analogies. One explains that in 1989, “millions of cases of imported fruit were banned after a small amount of cyanide was found in just two grapes.”
The Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR) claims that “cyanide is a very poisonous chemical” that causes brain and heart damage, coma and death. The crazy part of this situation is that one cigarette contains 33 times that much.
Similarly, another commercial tells of the 72 million bottles of water that were recalled in 1990 because of “small traces of benzene” found in them. ATSDR states that long-term benzene exposure “can cause anemia and leukemia” and is of great health risk to anyone exposed over long periods of time. Ironically, one pack of unfiltered cigarettes produces as much benzene as 169 bottles of contaminated water.
It is incredibly ironic that the government is so quick to “protect” us from dangerous imperfections in grapes and water but allows tobacco companies to continue to produce a product that kills more Americans than AIDS, drugs, homicides, fires and auto accidents combined.
I am in no way attempting to demean or talk badly about smokers. I used to be one. But the next time a Crazyworld commercial comes on your television, don’t take it as a reminder to fire up another cig.
Listen to what it has to say.
Understand that the consequences of your actions are real.
If you still feel like smoking after all things are considered, light up.
It’s your Crazyworld.
Live in it while you still can.

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